Eric Pickles, one of the men supposedly in charge of fighting the floods, tells the Commons that he "can and will provide the security that hardworking families deserve". What, some may ask, about those who do not form part of a hardworking family, which for many good reasons, not everyone can: don't they deserve protection too? But it isn't just Mr Pickles. The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, vows to get tougher on terrorism. "I think," his sidekick, the Lib Dem Simon Hughes says, that "hardworking taxpayers would expect nothing less"; while Labour's justice spokesman, Sadiq Khan, counters that the Grayling proposal is more about prime ministerial weakness than ensuring that the justice system "delivers for hardworking people". They're all of them at it, like their predecessors in the US, and here too, through the Blair-Brown years; but now even more so. Has it never entered their underworking heads that voters are no longer conned by such overworked and transparently silly devices? That when an adjective like "hardworking" is so routinely employed, it ceases to have any meaning? If they must persist in this fashion, let them at least command their hardworking aides to purchase them a thesaurus, where they will find alternative words such as assiduous, industrious, sedulous, persevering, or even just plain toiling. Better still would be to impose a stiff penalty for this insultingly patronising practice – perhaps several years of hard labour.